AGAINST THE GRAIN

Jason Shadley let out a bitter chuckle as he gave me directions to his house last week.

"It's here on the left," he said, sitting in the passenger seat of my car. "The street's called Dad's Way."

The phrase was filled with irony for Shadley. This dad of two youngsters hasn't seen his children in more than two years. He went off to serve his country in Iraq and came home to an empty apartment and a wife who had left town without leaving him so much as a note.

"If I had done what she did, I'm sure I'd have been in jail by now. There'd have been all kinds of Amber Alerts," he said softly as we idled outside the duplex he shares with five roommates. "My life has been hell since then. To this very day, I've been in a living hell."

In 2004, at age 25, Shadley decided he wanted to join the Army National Guard. He had dreams of flying a Blackhawk helicopter and parlaying that into a civilian career as a Medevac pilot. But he scored 10 points too low on an Army aptitude test to qualify for chopper training and ended up with a career detecting bombs.

His title was "combat engineer," he told me, and he quickly discovered why it's the Army vocation with the shortest life expectancy. He spent his days rolling along Baghdad roads at 5 mph in a Humvee, staring down every plastic bag, pothole or animal carcass that might contain a charge. During one year "in country," Shadley's platoon was hit by 28 bomb blasts.

During the final attack, his Humvee was transformed into an inferno after it rolled over a strip of "Christmas lights," the nickname for the thin sponge strips that detonate when compressed. Shadley got out unscathed; he couldn't wait to get home to his wife and kids.

But he was in for a rude surprise. His 33-year-old sister in his hometown of Sikeston, Tami Sain, said several weeks before Shadley's November 2006 return, his wife, Hope Nickole Shadley, had a breakdown. Sain went over to the house, she said, and found the children being cared for by a woman she didn't know. Prescription medication and syringes for legal drugs were also visible, she said. Days later, without warning, Hope took off for Florida.

"She was just the day before telling me how much she loved him and wanted him home, and then she up and left," Sain said in a phone interview. "She didn't tell anybody; she just packed up the kids and left."

When Shadley got home, his sister says, he was beside himself. He couldn't bear to stay in the empty apartment and slept at her place. "Just to see him cry for days and days broke my heart," Sain said. Shadley called his wife, and for a while they talked on the phone regularly. Shadley even planned to visit her.

Then she disappeared again. At first he just thought her cell phone had died, but as weeks stretched into months, he thought otherwise. It was a cat-and-mouse game. Shadley would find Hope's new number by calling friends and family members or through Internet searches, and things would be OK for a few weeks. Then she would disappear again. She refused to give him her address or let him see the kids.

In April of this year, he got a notice that he would begin paying child support. Though he was no longer on active duty, Shadley and his attorney, Mark Abbott, say he is forced to pay an exorbitant amount - $532.50 every two weeks. (Court documents online show Shadley only owes $710 per month.) Shadley makes a little more than $800 every two weeks as a $10.50-an-hour PVC pipe gluer.

The payments forced him to live out of his car and skip meals. Abbott petitioned the state's family support division to release Hope's address, but they refused, citing privacy laws. Abbott asked both Boone and Clay counties - the Shadleys lived in Clay County before he was deployed - to file parental kidnapping charges. Prosecutors from both counties declined. Boone says it doesn't have jurisdiction, and Clay says it can't take action without a police report.

"This is why we have parental kidnapping laws on the books," said a frustrated Abbott. "Just because you're a parent doesn't mean you can't be a kidnapper."

Shadley has now filed for divorce with custody of the children. Abbott said he plans to subpoena "everybody and their brother" until he gets some information about where the children are.

Shadley is skeptical. Abbott is his third lawyer, and experience has taught him not to get his hopes up.

He hasn't spoken to his wife in seven months and says he just wants to be a father again. He has only seen his 3-year-old daughter once, and he wonders if his 7-year-old son even remembers his face.

"This is my life, right here," said a tearful Shadley, displaying a photo of his son on his cell phone. "He's so smart. When I got back from basic training, I had a green, angled flashlight, and he'd take it apart completely and put it back together. He was 3. We did everything together. He was my right-hand man."